Are you a visual person? Looking for some deeper insights into what your visitors are doing on your website? Want to boost your conversions, but not sure where to start? A heatmapping tool might just be your answer! Heatmapping tools are great for tracking user behaviour patterns on specific pages of your website and are actually quite easy to use

If you’ve ever worked in the service industry I’m sure the chant “the customer is always right” still rings in your head. Customer service and the customer journey are not new concepts. However, the medium that customer service is carried out through today is new. With the eruption and growth of the internet over the past 20 years – the entire customer journey has been rewritten – no matter how long you’ve been in business or what industry you’re in. As the way we do business evolved, the customer experience evolved with it. But why has it been so difficult for businesses to transition?

And changes in behavior happen faster than ever. Consumers learn about products, compare prices, share opinions, consume content, and make their decisions where and when it best serves them on their consumer journey – their path to purchase. Different websites, devices, store channels and media types (both online and offline) interact to impact consumers throughout their journey. This forms the consumer experience that is ultimately decisive for the success or failure for brands and retailers.

To make things even more complex, consumers’ paths to purchase are highly different for different consumer segments, purchase channels and shopper missions. Most CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) giants and top retailers agree with the importance of an omnichannel perspective on the consumer experience. However, most of them have yet to move beyond single-channel tactics.

No matter what services your company provides or what communication platforms you use, customer experience (CX) needs to be at the core of everything you do. With all the tools that are available to help brands engage with their customers -- from social media to artificial intelligence-based resources like product recommendations and chatbots -- there are more opportunities than ever to create powerful customer experiences that build loyalty and drive sales.

But these tools aren’t going to use themselves, nor will a CX-focused culture spontaneously arise on its own. Brands need to make CX a priority at every level, from the first moment a consumer decides to explore their products online to the final step of the customer journey to the ongoing relationship that may last for years or even decades.

A 360-degree customer journey is a set of ideas and methods meant to take you from vague promises of being “customer-centric” to a concrete process for measurably offering more value to customers. By better understanding individuals and groups of customers, you’ll find ways to make your products more useful and smooth out the buying process, building an engaged audience for your brand along the way.

Recently, a lot of trending customer journey analysis around user experience, marketing and technology, is attempting to take humans and their cost out of consideration, replacing them with technology and automation. But what are we pursuing with such an effort?

Apart from optimisation and efficiency, are we pursuing the anticipation of emotions or feelings in a given circumstance and expecting technology and automation to take care of it? Interestingly, most successful brand stories are about human beings who have gone out of their way to help customers.

One reason for that is “help” between brands and customers is based on empathy rather than just solutions. So, it is paradoxical to find a lot of content surrounding AI focused on making contact “more human” and more “naturally conversational”. With that said, are we expecting AI to drive customer-brand relationships rather than solutions?

"In this three-part series, Wirecard discusses global trends in e- and m-commerce and offers ideas and tips for leveraging those trends – AI, the Internet of Things, and more – to scale your business and provide a truly 21-century customer service experience that consumers worldwide are coming to expect. In Part 1, we looked at some innovations that will be key to answering consumers’ demand for speedy payments. In Part 2, we presented ways to leverage the entire customer journey to present payment opportunities and strengthen relationships.

In Part 3, we provide tips on optimizing UX (user experience) for diverse global markets and processing payments within a framework that has to accommodate numerous currencies and regulations. "

Technology and innovation are changing the commerce landscape. Businesses can either evolve or face disruption due to mediocrity.

Today, technology shapes every aspect of our lives – communication, commerce, education, and the list goes on. This revolution has disrupted industries as a whole, challenging established practices and beliefs. One of these disruptions is commerce through brick-and-mortar establishments. You can do so much more using technology than by relying on the traditional in-store experience.

As a business owner, you should realize now that competition is not the store next door. It might be an amazing e-commerce website or a distributor in Thailand with an active social media page. To build a storefront of the future, you need to digitize the way you do business. That means investing in systems that help you build a modern storefront that is open to any and all customers, online or offline. Let's take a walk through next-gen retail tech that might reshape your business in the years to come.

Many businesses put a lot of effort into creating effective website designs.

They try to build sites filled with intuitive navigation, strong branding and clear customer journeys. But while investing in a functional and beautiful website is necessary, some digital destinations forget one small web page whose appearance can have an impact on their conversion rates: the 404 error page.

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Mopinion: The Leading User Experience Tool

Mopinion is a proud sponsor of User Experience News. The voice of the online user is taking on an increasingly important role when it comes to improving websites and apps. So web analysts and digital marketeers are making more and more use of User Experience Tools in order to collect experience from the user. Mopinion takes it one step further and offers a solution to analyse and visualise User Experience results from your websites and apps wherever you need them. The real challenge for companies is not about capturing experience, it is about how to make sense of the data.